Self help

One of the many things life is good at is presenting us with challenging situations.

We might have to speak in public, go through difficult medical procedures, visit relatives we can’t stand, deal with angry customers and do many more things that we would prefer not to.

You could just grit your teeth and get on with it or you could use tapping processes to ease your apprehension and find the resources you need to be the best you can be in that situation.

So, you might start looking for tapping scripts that ‘work’ for your problem. You might hope with just a few rounds of tapping that you can go from stressed / distressed / anxious / terrified to calm / centred / happy / relaxed.

It’s a simple solution that probably won’t work.

In a culture that values ‘positive’ feelings and rejects (or fears) ‘negative’ feelings many people focus on getting past feeling bad to feeling good as quickly as possible. They hope that if the tapping ends on a high note then all will be well.

In the understandable desire for (premature) reassurance we try to speed past difficult feelings and get to the enjoyable ones.

Unfortunately, to genuinely access your emotional resources it’s more effective to resolve what gets in their way.

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Tapping/EFT is an excellent self-help tool. It’s a simple way to soothe emotional stress and remove personal difficulties.

All you need to do is notice what is going on in your thoughts and feelings, then direct your tapping to soothe those troublesome memories, emotions or beliefs.

Using EFT on memories, emotions or beliefs can be quite straightforward, especially if you know what to tap on.

But sometimes it can be difficult to use tapping for self-help, because it can be hard to tap for ourselves, while we are in the middle of what we are tapping on.

Working on your own stuff can be difficult because:

When you are on the inside of the problem you are affected by the feelings and emotions of that problem. If the problem is upsetting or scary you will be upset or scared. It’s difficult to do good work if you are feeling strong emotions.

When you are inside the problem you see the problem through the perspective of the problem, it is as if you are wearing ‘problem goggles’. For example: if the problem is that you think there is nothing you can do to help yourself, that belief will get in the way of working on that belief because you will think there is nothing you can do to help yourself.

When you are inside a problem it’s hard to see what’s going on – it’s easier to read the label when you are outside the jar. Being a human is complicated. We are full of contradictory thoughts, feelings and responses, in so much confusion it can be difficult to see what is important. To people on the outside it might be obvious, but when you are on the inside it’s not so clear.

This is why working with another person who can see what you can’t see and guide your tapping accordingly can be so helpful.

A skilled EFT practitioner won’t be feeling what you are feeling, they won’t be wearing your ‘problem goggles’ and from the outside they can sometimes see what is going on in us more clearly.

But, there is never another tapper around when you need one!

What if you could more easily see what needs to be done and more easily work with it?

3rd Person tapping helps you be both on the inside and outside of the problem.

By asking surprisingly simple questions we can work with our stuff as if we were someone else and gain a little extra distance and perspective to help our tapping do the work it needs to do.

Sometimes our thoughts can be like barbed hooks running through our mind.

When those thoughts catch our minds, they dig in and we get pulled where we don’t want to go.

As babies we have an unfiltered experience of the world. We see, hear and feel things, our inner lives are a chaos of sensations and impressions.

As we grow up we learn to think to make sense of the world. Thinking helps us make some sense out of the chaos. We learn to throw nets of thoughts over our experience to understand what is happening and to help us to decide what to do.

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Do you ever notice what you say to yourself. Many people, including me, have a stream of internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we are doing and how well we are doing it. It’s often most noticeable when we feel we’ve made some blunder. “Oh, what an idiot!”, “How could you be so stupid!”, “I wish I hadn’t said that, what was I thinking?”, and so on.

For many of us this commentary is not delivered in a friendly understanding tone, quite the contrary, we often berate ourselves in a way that would get us beaten up if we were to use it on other people. We’d also want beat up anyone who used that tone on us, but we ‘happily’ castigate ourselves without mercy.

If you recognise this in yourself, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, you might like to ask yourself: “Is this kind of commentary doing me any good?” or “Would I expect this from a compassionate friend?”

If the answer to those questions is no, what can you do about it? Here’s one way to work with critical thoughts, borrowed from an American Zen monk Cheri Huber (just in case you were wondering about the name, in the Zen tradition ‘monk’ is a unisex term).

When you notice yourself having a critical thought, say to yourself in a friendly, interested tone of voice: “Hmm, that’s interesting, how do you know that?”. Wait for the answer. When it comes it may well be another critical thought (they run in packs), if so ask again in a friendly tone “Hmm, that’s interesting, how do you know that?”. Just continue in this vein, you may find yourself learning quite a bit about the way your mind works.

In this way you can begin to question the unquestioned authority of these thoughts, many of which were absorbed in childhood and have been knitted into your internal experience. It may take a lot of persistence to challenge all the negative thoughts and comments that are floating around in there, but a little awareness followed by a quizzical enquiry may go along way to making them much less convincing.

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Unless stated otherwise these articles are the copyright of Andy Hunt and are licensed under a Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

Disclaimer

The techniques and processes presented on this website are for your information only, they are not a substitute for appropriate professional medical, or mental health, advice and care. Results cannot be guaranteed.